Click to enlarge the image

This topic is related to all aspects of research dealing with inventoring forest resources and the availability of forest biomasses for different usages. Forest inventory can be considered as the systematic collection of data and forest information which can be further exploited for assessment or analysis of the exisisting resources. These data are usually collected at national level (NFI = national forest inventory), but the precision depends on the spatial resolution of the data acquired. The most important information of forestry inventories are the tree species, the dendometric measurements (diameter at breast height (DBH) and height) and the age. From these data, different information can be calculated such as the umber of trees per hectare, the basal area, the volume of trees in an area, and the value of forest products, such as timber. However, forest inventories do not only record dendrometric data, but also forest and site characteristics. From foresty inventory data, current and future availability of forest products, and more particularly wooden biomass, can be estimated. However, wood availability cannot be directly calculated from NFI data, firstly because NFI does not distinguish between exploitable and non-exploitable forests for example under environmental protection constraints, and secondly because overestimations can occur as economical restrictions are not taken into account, including harvest losses, physical constraints of accessibility that make harvesting unprofitable, or market conditions. Thus, economic data independent from the forest inventory and specific expertise are sometimes used to estimate:

i) harvesting system costs as a function of accessibility, cut types and stand characteristics;

ii) stumpage prices as a function of species and stand characteristics;

iii) roadside wood prices as a function of species and assortments.

The needs for projections on forests and wood resources arise from two main categories of forest stakeholders: 

 Public authorities, at European, national and regional levels, require projections to define and assess public policies, for strategic guidance and planning on the industrial roundwood (sawing, papers and panels) and fuelwood sectors, or to report the contribution of forests to carbon sequestration as required by international policy processes on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

 Private or semi-private actors, including the National forest services that manages the public forests, timber, paper, panel and fuelwood companies, and other forest products professional organisations needing information on wood availability and quality in a given area to support their economic strategies.

The most important R&D topics on this subject are currently :

 Creation, storage, maintenance and exploitation of databases (bigdata)

 Development of methodologies and algorithmes to extract information about availability of wooden resources from forest inventories.

 Improve the spatial resolution by increasing the data collection in forest fields and advancing remote sensing technologies (lidar, satellite images very high resolution,..)

 Use of GIS information in wood resource projections

 Developping forest growth models taking into account technical, economic or unforecastted factors in the forest production such as data on fellings, data on extreme climatic disasters or changes, data on wood assortments of standing trees, data on wood assortments of removals, etc

 User-friendly computational interfaces between databases, mapping